The related, commonly-assigned application, Ser. No. 234,977, describes various schemes for pre-processing mail, before delivery to the Post Office, to assist the Post Office in handling, processing, and delivery of mail. The underlying concept is work-sharing. The mailer in exchange for postage discounts would guarantee to the Post Office that the mail delivered to it would comply with Post Office regulations regarding acceptability. The system there described emphasizes batch mailings and pre-processing by a sampling technique to determine various parameters of the mail batch, such as size, address readability, font type, correct postage, and deliverability. The output from the pre-processing is a report to the Post Office which categorizes the batch and certifies to the batch content and its compliance with Postal regulations. The Post Office can then rely on this report to eliminate its own acceptance procedures for this batch, and to schedule processing to conform to the batch contents.
The related, commonly-assigned application, Ser. No. 285,145, describes another invention adapted to increase the number of deliverables for mailers. The problem addressed in this case is the accuracy of a mailing list maintained by the mailer, and used to address its mailings. The invention of that case is to provide a centralized data facility, which maintains databases of information useful to mailers, and which is connected by a communications link to a data facility at the mailer. For instance, one of the databases maintained at the central facility is a master database of customer names and addresses, and the central facility possesses the resources to continuously update or sanitize, as it is sometimes called, such databases. The mailer therefore need not maintain its own sanitizing facility, and need merely update its own customer list by downloading from the central facility a copy of its updated master list. However, this is an expensive and time-consuming task, and may not be necessary if the master list has not undergone much change.